Bookbinding, sketching, and collecting street art

Archive for December, 2010

Some of you will know that my father was diagnosed with advanced small cell lung cancer on 30th September – just three months ago. By the time the diagnosis was made the cancer had already spread to his liver. He was given two rounds of chemotherapy, which didn’t work, and then a short round of radiotherapy for symptom control.

My father died on Wednesday afternoon. He declined very quickly, quicker than the doctor and nurses expected, but he passed away peacefully at home with his family – and that was all he wanted towards the end. To be at home with those he loved. We’re grateful that he didn’t suffer too much at the end – one minute he was there, the next he was gone.

Words really are inadequate right now. Mum and I are bearing up as best we can, with the amazing support of my partner, Matt. I will be posting again soon, for a sense of normality, but for now I’ll end with some photos of my dad which have lovely memories attached:

Sorry it’s a little blurry, the light is pretty pants today, and I was balancing on an armchair, wobbling all over the place, trying to get the whole blanket in shot!

It’s been a really fun project to work on, as well as having a lot of sentimental attachment. Dad’s been using it for a while, and I kept stealing it back to add more squares when I was able to this week. When it reached its current size dad said he thought it was big enough (it was getting treacherously heavy and I was also a bit worried it would be too heavy for him if I kept making it bigger), so I edged the whole thing with a simple edging of one round of DC and one of SC.

I think it ties the whole thing together nicely, neatening up the border and matching the thick cream borders around each individual square.

I asked dad if he would pick out some favourite squares, and here are his choices:

He’s pretty poorly at the moment, but I’m hoping to get a shot of him with the blanket next week some time.

Thank you again to all the lovely ladies who contributed yarn for this blanket. I really couldn’t have done it without you, and it’s added extra meaning when I’ve been working with the different yarns. It’s a blanket made entirely of love and kindness – thank you.

As MacGyver is “a series about a quiet and mild mannered secret agent who makes use of any mundane materials around him to create unorthodox solutions to problems” I’m very flattered! (I loved watching MacGyver when I was a kid!)

Click here to visit Erica’s treasury and see what the other Etsy MacGyvers have been up to.

In bookbinding, a dos-à-dos binding (from the French meaning “back-to-back”) is a binding structure in which two separate books are bound together such that the fore edge of one is adjacent to the spine of the other, with a shared lower board between them serving as the back cover of both. When shelved, the spine of the book to the right faces outward, while the spine of the book to the left faces the back of the shelf.

I made three different books using a dos-à-dos binding last year, and this week I decided to make some more. I love the look of them, they’re slightly bonkers but, really, quite utilitarian.

I was watching an episode of Eastwick while sewing these books, and the conversation quoted above is from that episode – very appropriate, or so I thought!

Earlier this year I bought a load of pages from vintage comic books (mostly Dandy I believe), and made a couple of notebooks using the pages for covers. They were quite popular, but I got distracted by other things and forgot about them for a while.